Sir Adrian Boult (conductor)
Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
The Planets, Op.32 (1914-17)
A Fugal Overture, Op.40 No.1 (1922-23)
Hammersmith, Op.52 (1930 orch. 1931)
George Butterworth (1885-1916)
The Banks of Green Willow (1913)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Sinfonia antartica (1953)
Sir William Walton (1902-1983)
Symphony No.1 in B flat minor (1934-35)
Margaret Marshall (soprano)
BBC Symphony Chorus & Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra (A Fugal Overture and The Banks of Green Willow)
rec. 1969–1977, Barking Town Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Royal Albert Hall
ICA Classics ICAC5173 [2 CDs: 153] 

Boult died in 1983 and this 2-CD fortieth anniversary salute contains works of which he gave the premiere – Holst’s The Planets and Hammersmith, Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow – as well as (or including) three recordings that have never before been issued, A Fugal Overture, Hammersmith and the Sinfonia antartica. 

There must be 10,000 different recordings of Boult’s The Planets – at least, it seems like that, and most people seem satisfied with their tried and tested favourite whichever that happens to be – but this one from the Royal Albert Hall on 7 September 1973 has a bite and an intensity that takes one back to his first, wartime reading, though in immeasurably better sound. Those who think he always trotted out ‘his’ version of the piece may not appreciate that he was subject to orchestral vagaries (have you heard his Vienna recording?) and to the lower wattage of studio recording. If you also know his 1966 New Philharmonia recording, with its somewhat bloated profile – there’s an exceedingly waddling Venus for example – you will welcome his re-evaluation in 1973. There’s hardly anything – other than sonics – between his granitic tread in Mars and that 1945 recording. The brass and percussion are well caught, even in the Albert Hall, and the harp is well balanced in Venus where the BBC Symphony’s winds are on eloquent form. Mercury is as deft as it invariably was with Boult, with glockenspiel audible, and Jupiter has a natural nobility. Even in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice frolics of the work, details register. Perhaps the chorus is not as ethereal as is ideal in Neptune in this this barn of a hall but the timing – 6:37, the marked 7:01 includes audience applause – is almost exactly the same tempo he took almost three decades before. The performance was released on a disc free with the BBC Music Magazine in July 2013. This ica is very quiet inter-movements and whilst I’ve not heard the magazine copy, I suspect ica has excised audience shuffling in its remastering.  

A Fugal Overture is taken from a Royal Festival Hall broadcast of 1971 and, not surprisingly, he takes the same tempo as he did in his very slightly earlier Lyrita recording, again with the LPO. Hammersmith (Royal Albert Hall, 12 September 1973, given five days after The Planets) was given its premiere by Boult in its orchestral form. It is in outline almost a carbon copy of the Lyrita recording of the very late 60s. Boult always caught its raucous fun and draws out the piccolo writing finely. If this is a mini-London Symphony or Cockaigne, it works well. The Butterworth comes from a performance in Barking Town Hall on 26 November 1969. He also performed pieces by Elgar, Bax, Hadley and Bliss that evening (they have been released on BBC Radio Classics).

Boult was equivocal about Walton’s music. The Horlicks-drinking Unitarian was asked to repeat the First Symphony, contained on CD2 and given on 3 December 1975, at the following year’s Prom but he demurred adding ‘…I couldn’t face all that malice a second time…I remember how I felt about the Coronation Te Deum. It was really Pagan.’  He’d recorded the Symphony commercially for Nixa in 1956 three years after taping that pastoral and quietly un-Pagan little piece, Belshazzar’s Feast (review). Before the 1975 performance Walton corresponded with Boult about the earlier recording and the forthcoming performance. Whatever metronome instructions the composer gave to Boult seem to have encouraged the conductor to an unprecedentedly furious tempo in the Andante con malinconia. If you know Walton’s own tempo here – which is the same as Boult’s in 1956 – you will be startled to find that Boult whips through it in just a touch more than 7 minutes, utterly changing its character. As for Previn, he took about 11 minutes. It’s something Boult was prone to do. He did it – of all things – in a performance of the slow movement of Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony a few months earlier, in August 1975, interestingly also preserved by ica (review). 

Walton wasn’t really the composer for Boult but VW is another matter, of course. This performance of the Sinfonia antartica was given in the Royal Festival Hall on 12 October 1977, and is the last of ten public performances he gave of the work. It was also his last public performance. After the interval another conductor directed A Sea Symphony. Boult’s unflappable control is evident even here though tempi diverge from those he took earlier, most obviously in the third movement, with Alan Harverson’s organ spookily audible, which he takes about a minute and a half slower than in his EMI recording of 1969 and the mono of 1953 – though this last contained John Gielgud’s readings. This is a trenchant, vivid performance and its tempo modifications are worthy of note – faster than ever in the opening movement and slower than before in the third. He maximises flow therefore in the Prelude and draws the Landscape movement tighter, meaning its spectral elements – the organ, the mighty cymbal crash and the brass – register with visceral intensity. There’s no point holding back in this symphony and you need to draw out every ounce of its weird and intoxicating sense of colour and immediacy. Margaret Marshall is the raptly eloquent soprano.

‘Newly remastered’ rans the banner line on the disc cover, and that’s Paul Baily’s job. It sounds excellent to me, especially the VW and The Planets. There’s an admirable booklet. John Pattrick, executive producer, should be very content with this impressive twofer.

Jonathan Woolf

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